The United States, under pressure from its giant pharmaceutical companies, is trying to undermine the use in poor countries of cheap, copycat Aids drugs, made by ”pirate”, generic companies but validated by the World Health Organisation, campaigners claim.
US drug companies want the money promised for President George Bush’s Aids plan to be spent on their products.
The American department of health and human sciences has now convened a conference in Botswana at the end of the month that will question the WHO’s approval process for generic drugs, known as ”pre-qualification”.
If the cheap drugs, which sell for less than R1 980 per patient per year, are discredited and the more expensive brand-name drugs are bought instead, the limited money available for treatment will help fewer people and reduce the WHO’s hopes of getting three-million on treatment by 2005.
”It is not quality and safety and efficacy they [the American companies] are concerned about, but the protection of patents,” said Rachel Cohen of Médecins sans Frontières in the US. ”The real reason this conference is being held is to come up with ways of undermining generic drugs.”
Plans to put millions of people on drugs to try to stem the Aids epidemic are based in most African countries on the purchase of cheap copies of drugs invented and under patent in the US and Europe. People with HIV need a daily cocktail of three drugs to suppress the virus in the body and stay alive and well.
Because the patents on the component drugs are held by different multinationals, only the generic companies make a basic three-in-one pill. A very simple regime, taking one pill, twice a day, is considered to be most feasible in poor countries. Scientists working for the WHO have examined and approved certain generic three-in-one pills.
About 50 000 people are already taking these generic Aids drugs. MSF, which runs free Aids treatment programmes in Africa, gives them to some 9 000 patients. In Zimbabwe, it treats patients for about R1 308 to about R1 632 a year. A programme by the US Centres for Disease Control uses brand-name drugs at R 3 900 per patient per year. In addition, the patient has to take six pills a day, instead of two.
When President Bush pledged R96-billion for Aids in his state of the union address last year, and hailed the plunge in drug prices to R1 980 a year, it was assumed that the US would be willing to buy generics to make the money go further. However, Randall Tobias, the former chief executive of the giant US drug company Eli Lilly and the man appointed to head the president’s Aids strategy, claims that generic drugs manufactured overseas may not be made to the consistency and quality of those manufactured in the US.
”It would be a disaster if we invested in drugs that were not consistent, don’t have all the right components and we just don’t know whether some of these do or do not,” he told the House of Representatives’ international relations committee earlier this month.
But WHO officials involved in approving the generic drugs defend their system, pointing out that the drug regulatory agencies of France, Switzerland, Canada and South Africa are among those involved in the process. – Guardian Unlimited Â